The Settlement

The Settlement is not a single treaty but a body of norms, laws and institutions that grew out of the Basin Compacts and the Partition, and it serves as its members' constitution. It is one of four blocs on Earth, and the richest per head. Its core idea: AI may help humanity with almost anything except think for people before they have learned to think for themselves.

The Unassisted Mind (the education ring-fence)

Children learn without general-purpose AI until they pass the Threshold — not an age but a demonstrated competence: reasoning, reading, numeracy, a practical craft, and the ability to argue against their own position. Most who pass do so between 17 and 21; some never pass. The charter cities that founded the Settlement had lived through the Hollowing and wanted a thinking population, not a thinking elite, so from the start Settlement polities have aimed for at least 75% of adults to hold the right to vote, through the Second Schooling: paid study leave for adults, and oral and practical examinations staffed in full. By 2497 most polities have long met the target, and only a few laggards are still below it. Where the rate is below 75%, the Vaults offer possible adjustments. The Chamber can pass the laws needed, but adjustments that touch the constitution go to a ballot (see The Chamber, in Politics). The Threshold also moves with its candidates. When cohorts beat the targets of about 70% passing first time and about 80% by the third attempt, the Vaults raise the bar a notch. It can be lowered again, but never below the test of five years before. A polity that cannot reach 70% even on that test is studied, and its Vaults propose remedies, as they do for the 75% target. Signing offices in the Slow Lane are open only to citizens (see Other pillars, below). The Threshold's founding rules sit in the constitution's entrenched tier and cannot be changed at all.

• Before sitting the Threshold: human teachers, physical books, hands-on making, outdoor work, apprenticeships in drawdown or repair crews. Schools are deliberately low-tech, and the devices children carry are dumb. The single exception is the licensed tutor: a narrow, audited, non-sentient AI that may only ask questions and give one hint at a time, never an answer, essay or finished solution; it keeps no companionship role and its logs are open to parents and examiners. The design descends from early-twenty-first-century step-by-step tutors that more than doubled learning. Unlicensed AI before the Threshold is illegal for children to use and for adults to supply. The ring-fence covers AI systems, not persons: Raised minds may raise and teach children as human carers and teachers do. By 2497 the custom matters more than the law. A child who is allowed AI unlicensed by the board of education still has to pass the Threshold unassisted, so a parent who supplies one is understood to be cheating the child, not the system.
• After passing the Threshold: Professionals must re-qualify unassisted on a schedule — mostly in simulation. Surgeons, pilots and engineers work truly unassisted only in training and emergencies. This is a direct answer to the deskilling of the Hollowing.
• Ancestors: early-twenty-first-century bans on children's social media and phones in schools (Australia's under-16 social media law took effect in December 2025) are taught as the first, clumsy ancestors of the Threshold.
• The price: some people never pass, and there is a constant race between cheats and the closing of loopholes. The temptation falls hardest on those who keep failing: a teenager or young adult who has failed several times watches friends vote, take licensed work and leave school behind. But cheating a test the Vaults set and mark is exceptionally rare and expensive, within reach only of the very wealthy, the same families who could already give their children the best embryo edits, so every exposed cheat is a scandal about privilege as much as about the exam (see Politics). To stop wealth buying an edge before birth through embryo editing, parents who edit their own child must pay an equal sum towards edits for poorer families (see Designed children, in Ageing slowed, not ended). The Open Cities, which reject the ring-fence and set no Threshold for the vote, are less cohesive and more unequal (see Politics).

Adults who have not passed the Threshold may use general-purpose AI under the same rules as other adults. They retain the same ordinary civil and economic rights as citizens. They cannot vote, enter official higher education or hold a signing office. Second Schooling remains available to help them pass.

How the Settlement acts together

The Settlement is a union of self-governing polities. Its members run their own schools, health services, courts and ordinary policing. They share institutions for defence, external treaties, the working Vaults, the mirror array and the rights guaranteed by the Settlement.

The common government grew from the cooperation of the Basin Compacts. Its founders drew on the old United Nations: an assembly of members, a permanent administration and a smaller body able to act between meetings.

The Assembly of Polities

Each member polity sends a delegation chosen by its Chamber. Delegates carry their Chamber’s instructions and answer to it.

The Assembly approves common spending, treaties and policy. Major decisions require both a majority of member polities and delegations representing a majority of the Settlement’s population. Large members cannot rule alone, and small members cannot combine to overrule most of its people.

Member contributions, shared revenues and the proceeds of common assets pay for these institutions. The Assembly approves their budget. The constitutional floor and the Vault dividend that supports it remain protected.

The Executive Council

A small Executive Council, elected by the Assembly for fixed terms, carries out its decisions. Seats rotate between member polities; none has a permanent seat or an individual veto.

The Council appoints the Settlement’s representative to the Anchorage, negotiates under instructions from the Assembly and coordinates common defence. Member polities assign forces to joint commands. Major military action requires Assembly approval; standing agreements allow immediate defence while that approval is sought.

The Council’s members remain subject to the usual rules on qualification, tenure and accountability. Consequential actions require the appropriate Slow Lane signature.

Administration and law

A permanent Secretariat administers shared programmes, inspections and common assets. Human and Raised staff work with licensed tools. Named officials remain responsible for decisions.

The Settlement Court hears disputes between member polities and claims that a member has violated Settlement rights. Citizens and residents may bring cases before it. Members accept its judgments as a condition of belonging to the Settlement. The Court judges whether officials and institutions have obeyed the constitution and the law; it does not replace the Council of Minds in settling disputed screening forecasts.

The Council of Minds continues to decide disputed screening verdicts and oversee probationary laws. Common laws and rules pass through the same constitutional screening required of member polities. Officials carry them out under their existing authority and remain accountable for their decisions.

The arrangement produces constant argument. Wealthier members resent their contributions, frontier members demand protection, and off-Earth settlements complain that Earth decides too much. The common institutions endure because their members still gain more from belonging than from leaving.

Other pillars

• The Slow Lane. Any action affecting more than a set number of lives or a set quantity of resources must carry the signature of the holder of the relevant signing office, after a cooling-off delay. A signing office is a public post covering one domain, such as a dam, a fleet, a bloc's factories on Mercury or a polity's laws. Its holder is a named citizen who has qualified unassisted in that domain, as the Basin Compacts' operators did, re-qualifies on the same schedule as other professionals, and answers in law for every action they sign. Tools and Vaults may advise but never sign. The Settlement's founders reserved signing for humans who had passed the Threshold. No resident may hold a signing office anywhere in the Settlement, and most polities still bar Raised minds too, but a few polities (see The Ledger of Minds, below) already let Raised citizens sign, though never for the factories on Mercury, which stay human-only under Settlement-wide rules (see The Mirror Race). A growing movement, led by the Meridianists and Raised citizens, wants Raised citizens allowed to sign in every polity, the factories on Mercury included (see Factions in 2497, in Politics).
• The Ledger of Minds. There is a clear, uncontested test for sentience — the Indicator Audit — and every mind that passes is registered, at one of three tiers set for its kind (see Levels of sentience); animal kinds are registered too. Only the Dissolved blur it, passing at one sitting and failing at the next (see The Dissolution, in Recursive self-improvement). Across the world, what each tier earns varies: some polities give Tier 3 minds full personhood and equal rights, others limited rights, a few none. Within the Settlement, every Raised mind that passes the Threshold becomes a citizen, and that citizenship is recognised in every member polity. In some places, Raised citizens still face significant discrimination despite their legal rights. No Raised mind can pass as human: its core gives it away to any device, so what a mind is is never in doubt (see One mind, one form).
• Compute licensing. Training, running or self-modifying any mind beyond a set scale requires a licence (see How compute licensing is enforced, below).

How compute licensing is enforced

What stops a private Vault is not law but fear and Vault engineers. Capability is cheap in 2497; control is not. Anyone rich enough can build a system close to Vault level, but without Vault engineers the risk of a breach is a strong deterant; everyone knows how the Vesper Runaway ended (see Why it mostly works, in Recursive self-improvement). Compute licensing is the second line. It cannot stop illegal compute, only keep it small, old and expensive, and since no law can police every line of code, it polices hardware. Training, running or self-modifying any mind beyond a set scale needs a licence from a tribunal, and each polity holds a fixed total of licensed bulk compute: large clusters of chips, at the scale needed to train or run a mind. Ordinary computing below that scale is not capped. Compute at Vault level is prohibited outright outside the Settlement's own Vaults, so when an application comes near it, the tribunal puts the question to a Vault through the fast channel. The Settlement's total is itself capped by treaty with the other blocs. The rule was built on four chokepoints, and as energy spreads the weight has moved onto the fabs (chip fabrication plants) and the chips.

Manufacturing unsanctioned Vault hardware is treated as an act of war. A corporation that crosses that line risks being treated as a rogue state. Making simpler industrial controllers is a separate activity, not Vault-hardware manufacture.

• The fabs. The newest hardware comes from licensed fabrication plants, a few hundred across the solar system, each enormous, expensive and impossible to hide; older hardware is made much more widely. Since the Partition every licensed fab has been inspected continuously, and every chip it makes is registered from manufacture to scrapping. Taiwan's old chip industry now concentrates on design, research and small prototype production, inspected by both the Settlement and the Mandate under the Fab Truce. All bulk chip manufacturing is off Earth. Sites may make compute chips, industrial controllers or Raised cores, but these remain separate manufacturing capabilities. The factories of the Mirror Race depend on external controllers; factories designed around simpler controllers provide useful backup, but cannot sustain the race's current pace (see The chokepoint, in The Mirror Race). The inspections also track industrial supply (see The Mirror Race). A bloc that refuses a Vault inspection sees its fabs lose the inspection seals that let their chips pass between blocs. Fear of an AI escaping is generally greater than fear of the law, so owners of bulk compute, and their insurers, often ask for inspections even when the law does not require them.
• The chips themselves. Industrial controllers cannot support a Vault, alone or combined; networking, reprogramming or removing licence restrictions does not change their architecture (see The hardware distinction, in The Mirror Race). Compute chips support adaptable artificial minds. Every licensed compute chip carries attested firmware that logs what it runs and refuses to join a cluster larger than its licence allows. Large clusters need fresh licence keys to keep running; let a licence lapse and the hardware slows to a crawl. Tampering with the firmware usually destroys the chip. Licensed compute chips also refuse to join computing clusters with unregistered ones, so illegal compute must be built wholly from unlicensed or pre-Partition compute chips, older, slower and hungrier for power, and cut off from licensed networks; it lives on the wild networks instead. This restriction on pooled computing does not prevent a legal personal device from connecting to the Wild as a user. Once used there, however, that device is permanently blocked from protected networks (see Access to the Wild, in Everyday technology).
• Power and heat. Large-scale compute draws power like a town and sheds heat like a furnace. Grid operators must report unusual loads, and orbital sensors watch for heat that matches no licensed site. This check is failing. Off Earth, fusion and now beamed sunlight make power cheap and plentiful, and a habitat drawing it for a hidden cluster looks much like one drawing it for industry. The check still works on Earth, where the waste-heat limit keeps power scarce. Off Earth, illegal AI breakouts are as inevitable as the hubris of the people who build them. So far every illegal AI that has broken out has done so before reaching Vault-level intelligence and has been reined in, though fragments of them survive on the wild networks as ferals (see Kinds of mind).
• The fear is that one day an illegal AI will reach Vault level before it breaks out, and with a malicious or carelessly set goal it could be stopped only by releasing another superintelligence, which has never officially been done (though in reality the Open Cities did release a superintelligence to stop another one that had escaped; see Politics).
• People. Big runs need many hands. Rewards for informers are generous, and the penalties for unlicensed compute fall on everyone who helped.

Cutting industrial-controller deliveries does not remove a bloc's existing compute capacity.

The cap is also why bulk compute is scarce and brain renewal is rationed (see Ageing slowed, not ended). Raised minds fall under it too: each new core is licensed at a set capacity, whether it comes from a Settlement fab or from Freehold's.

Where it leaks. Enforcement is good, not perfect.

• Pre-Partition hardware survives in caches and wrecks: slow and power-hungry, but unregistered.
• Open City free ports and outer-Belt habitats run unlicensed fabs beyond inspectors' reach, and their hardware is smuggled in. These small fabs make older compute chips and simpler industrial controllers. The latter can supply factories designed around them, with lower output and greater maintenance and supervision needs. The expansion of the Caloris Runaway instead depended on a stockpile of compatible licensed industrial controllers and stopped when it ran out (see The Mirror Race).
• The wild networks. Because licensed compute chips will not join computing clusters with unregistered ones, illegal compute runs on networks of its own, outside licensed infrastructure. Legal personal devices may connect as users, but doing so permanently bars those devices from protected networks. They carry smugglers' traffic, black-market compute and the fragments of past breakouts that still run there as ferals (see Kinds of mind). Every bloc polices their edges, and none can shut them down.
• The few illegal Vaults found were built by Vault engineers bought, coerced or defected from a bloc (see Illegal Vaults, in Recursive self-improvement).

Everyday access

Level 1 protected access is free to everyone: basic personal communication, essential services and purchases, education and a public reference library. Level 1 also includes civic information and discussion, petitions, consultations and voting where eligible. Public terminals and loan interfaces keep these services usable without an implant. Level 2 adds wider public forums, hosted games and entertainment, and wider commerce for a fee (see Two levels of access, in Everyday technology). Children's interfaces remain subject to the education ring-fence.

What AI improves

• Health. AI-designed repair and rejuvenation medicine slowed ageing as a cause of death around 2300. See Ageing slowed, not ended.
• Climate. AI-designed catalysts, grid control and materials make drawdown and adaptation tractable; AI management of the parasol, after the Meridian scare, becomes a supervised, multi-party system.
• Space. Autonomous mining, self-repairing habitats and embodied sentient and non-sentient AI crews make the outward expansion possible (see Reaching outward).